We’ve done it.
Booked our vacation for 2011.
It only took us the entire year to decide…
And of course, it will be at the very end of the year.
I haven’t had a real non-work related trip for some time now, so as you can imagine, I’m fairly stoked. We decided to go to Banff over New Years. The original thing that drew us to Banff was the Banff Springs Hotel, but after looking at their prices (minimum $400 a night, up to $1400! Phew!) we decided that we’d go the cheaper route at a different hotel (and then loiter in the Banff Springs Hotel lobby when we could)
I’ve never been on a wintery vacation such as this. We have a cabin up north by 100 Mile House that for years and years I tried to convince my family to spend Christmas up there, but to no avail. In my mind, wintery vacations are lovely and perfect and cozy and all those things you think of when you imagine the perfect winter. I seem to have this problem, however, of setting myself up for failure with vacations. I imagine everything happening just as it should. No traffic on the way. The hotel rocks. The weather is perfect. Everything is reasonably priced. The food is amazing. In a sense, I’ve already experienced the vacation in my mind before I’ve even arrived at the location. When any one of those things don’t happen…well…
Perhaps, however, I should take a different approach to vacationing.
Perhaps I should imagine everything going wrong. Arriving late at night, barely finding the hotel (and when we do, there’s no parking). The bed will be too small, and it will be uncomfortable (hmm…so far, this sounds like our San Francisco experience). The weather will be unseasonably awful, and when we try to escape from the weather–everything will be closed. We will prepare to spend way too much on food. And it could taste really bad. We will have not packed things we need.
And so in this case if I imagine all these things as true, I can prepare for the worst. I’ll think – “Hmm, spending time stuck in the hotel room playing board games isn’t so bad.” Then if anything in the aforementioned list fails to happen I’ll be exceedingly happy.
Yay for vacations!

Today was our day off. We wandered some thrift stores in Langley and found a sweet board game from the 70′s called “Careers”. I would have some photos to post of the day, but when I went to take photos with my iPhone today the camera stopped functioning. Later in the day we went to the Mac Station (secretly hoping they’d say: “Poor girl! We will replace it with an iPhone 4″). All they did was reset it. And it worked again. Bittersweet, I guess.We also had (what I thought was) a brilliant idea while we were there. I have been ogling the iPad since it’s inception. I need it. There’s no way around this. I just need the iPad. But…getting it is a whole different story. But I had a cunning plan today. I have my old (4 years) macbook pro sitting in a drawer in my desk. I used it up until this summer when I got my iMac. It was kept because I thought I would want to still have something portable should we go on a trip. But then…I realized today, ‘What if I could trade it for an iPad?’ I brought it in to the Mac station to get them to evaluate how much they would trade it for. Not much they said (but I will find out tomorrow afternoon the exact number). Although I’m still hoping that (if the number is too low) I can sell it on eBay and get enough to get an iPad (at the Mac Station they have to buy it for quite a bit lower than if it was sold privately because they still need to make money for resale). Anyway…That’s my story for the day.I want an iPad.And I’ve got no exciting pictures to share. Sorry.